So, now that the Xoom has flopped, can we finally agree that "tablet" means "iPad"?

What the hell are you talking about, I can literally install and use the same software on a Surface Pro that's currently on my desktops and laptops right now (well, barring hardware limitations, I won't be playing high end games on a tablet, but I can't do that on a laptop either so meh).

I don't have to fuck around with a useless shitheap program like iTunes or convert data into different formats or deal with some mobile version of a program. I just use what I already have.

And no, this isn't restricted to me. The number of people solely using a limited device like an iPad are vanishingly small.

My, so much hostility. Is someone forcing you to use an iPad against your will?

The reality is, Tablets are here to stay and they are improving with every iteration. iPad have become lighter, better resolution, better battery life, more features. It just gets better. People are discovering that they can get away without using a hardware keyboard for the majority of their tasks (especially with improving voice recognition). The fact that Apple is still growing their market year over year is proof that many people realize they don't need a computer with a physical keyboard.

Have fun venting.

And even more are finding that they still need a computer.

Yup, nobody is throwing away their PCs for an iPad. They might for a Surface Pro though.

Don't compare it to an iPad; price, performance, size, and weight are all comparable to the MBA.

Think of it literally as a MBA with a touchscreen.

With a worse keyboard and a worse trackpad. 105g really isn't that much, it's basically 10% lighter and that doesn't include the cover.

Yes, and it's also thinner and got no hinge and it's multitouch.

It's a tradeoff to sacrifice keyboard and trackpad for improved portability, the same tradeoff that Apple did with the iPhone compared to, say, a BlackBerry.

and would be very easy to have a BT mouse/keyboard with a little stand (or the one built in) and you have pretty sweet setup. and if you use it at two locations--say work and home, even better.

I know. I'm really quite agnostic, I'm pro-future, pro-improvement, pro-technology, and if this is the future, I'm all for it.

The only question is when, not if, and who does it better, not who is preferred. If it is MS and Intel, then I replace my ThinkPad when it dies. If it is Apple and Intel(Haswell) or Apple(A6+), then I will replace my iPad when it dies.

I have multiple platforms in my household because there are unique strengths to each product.

I don't know of any tablets with user-accessible/removable batteries, but I'll be looking for one come tablet shopping time in a couple of months here.

After my fiancée and I bought our phones, we immediately went online and bought two extra batteries and two wall chargers (total cost $40). Have since got another battery from an insurance replacement.

Anyway, long story short - just the other day it occurred to me how awful it would be to have to use my phone while it's plugged in. Because with spare batteries, I haven't ever had to...

Life does not lose its joy when you have to plug in your phone to charge.

No, but you do lose the use of your phone.

Quote:

I'm also convinced phones with replaceable batteries have lower endurance because oems have no incentive to maximize it if a replacement is $40 away.

This doesn't really work. Battery replacement is just another feature in the feature wars. It just means, in the embedded case (which not a few Android product also do) that you have to bring the damn thing into the shop for the replacement.

Battery replacement is consumer friendly because nobody really relishes a trip to the dealer store, where prices are never that competitive all around.

Maybe the Apple crowd does; but then, I've always said Apple is the master of the upsell. This would be another one.

I think you misunderstand me, dramatically. What incentive does an OEM have to develop charge/discharge algorithms to increase battery longevity if they can rely on the user to buy a new battery for $40?

What incentive does an OEM have to develop charge/discharge algorithms to increase battery longevity if they can rely on the user to buy a new battery for $40?

The same one they do for any other product improvement -- meeting competition.

Sure for some particular product they are making right now, it may make sense to try and grab a few extra bucks that way. No development, extra bucks. A winner!

But, ordinary competitive forces will work against this -- just like any other sinecure of this type is always under pressure.

Maybe everyone relents for a few years, because these things often move in fits and starts, but you may as well posit that they don't take on any improvements of any kind.

Sooner or later, someone will find this a market differentiator -- and those who wanted it to be a sinecure are going to have to respond.

The other piece of it is that the investment in the software is likely to be predominantly a one-time cost. The major work comes once, the rest of the products see (at most) tweaks for years afterwards if not forever.

All this before we consider the possibility that this will be built in to the battery itself. If they are not user replaceable, they can include a little PCB that does all this. It probably could be done with a very high LSI type product because it might even still be doable with some homely little 8 or 16 bit processor and a few bytes of software. Today, that's probably doable on about the size and scale of the typical plus or minus terminal itself.

Why would it have to be $200? Tell me again how much a 64GB iPad costs?

Battery life it incredibly long. iT might be more than 16h.

You said it was "$300 less than an iPad." Why in the world would anyone assume you meant the 64GB model? Without specifying what you meant any reasonable person would assume you were alluding to the baseline price of entry, which is $500.

I think you misunderstand me, dramatically. What incentive does an OEM have to develop charge/discharge algorithms to increase battery longevity if they can rely on the user to buy a new battery for $40?

Their inability to rely on any such thing?Their desire to sell in countries with reasonable consumer protection laws?Their desire to promote battery longevity as a feature?An unavoidable consequence of the march of progress?

Life does not lose its joy when you have to plug in your phone to charge.

Of course not. But as ZZ said, the joy of using your phone/tablet takes a big hit. I do have a Nook Color, and it's a pain in the ass using it in lanscape when plugged in. Feels like an anchor pulling on one side of it.

Quote:

I'm also convinced phones with replaceable batteries have lower endurance because oems have no incentive to maximize it if a replacement is $40 away.

I think you misunderstand me, dramatically. What incentive does an OEM have to develop charge/discharge algorithms to increase battery longevity if they can rely on the user to buy a new battery for $40?

That cuts both ways. What incentive does an OEM with integrated battery have to develop charge/discharge algorithms to increase battery longevity if they can rely on the user to buy a change service for new battery for $85?

Both are nonsense. Either neither or both have no incentive to develop algorithms.

I'm so happy I never have to worry about charging my devices during a normal day. All of them (MBP Retina, iPad 3 LTE, iPhone 5) have no problem lasting through a full day. The iPhone 5 can go 36+ hours of heavy usage, including usually a couple hours as an LTE hotspot. I honestly haven't had a device die on me in almost 18 months.

The only time I could see needing to swap batteries is if I did something stupid like leave the iPad playing season of TV shows in the car while we went to Disneyland, but there's no way I'm going to go to the trouble of charging and carrying a spare battery for those situations.

As far as I can tell, if Apple's integrated battery consistently falls below 80% before two years, as they advertise, they will be at a disadvantage in the market compared to OEMs where two replacement batteries and chargers for $40.

In other words, their brand reputation suffers because the iPhone cannot live up to user's expectations.

Why should an OEM bother to extend the life of a battery that can be replaced for less than $20, possibly $10?

Why would the brand suffer if the device is designed to have it's batteries replaced cheaply?

As far as I can tell, if Apple's integrated battery consistently falls below 80% before two years, as they advertise, they will be at a disadvantage in the market compared to OEMs where two replacement batteries and chargers for $40.

In other words, their brand reputation suffers because the iPhone cannot live up to user's expectations.

Why should an OEM bother to extend the life of a battery that can be replaced for less than $20, possibly $10?

Why would the brand suffer if the device is designed to have it's batteries replaced cheaply?

There's nothing to lose for any manufacturer maximizing battery life on any device, IMO.

I'm just glad there are options, personally. Like I said, it's worth a lot to me to never have to use my phone when plugged in, and it's worth a lot to me to not even have to think about battery life as it goes low, knowing that I can just pull another out of my pocket and throw it on there.

So you'd prefer the girl behind you to stop her video chat, turn off her phone, pull off the back cover, yank out the battery, wedge in another battery, force the cover back on, boot the phone, reinitiate the video chat? Seems like a lot to pay for freedom

So you'd prefer the girl behind you to stop her video chat, turn off her phone, pull off the back cover, yank out the battery, wedge in another battery, force the cover back on, boot the phone, reinitiate the video chat?

I'd prefer for her to do whatever it is she likes best.

Quote:

Seems like a lot to pay for freedom

Fight it with all your might, cecil. Fight it with allll your might.

Some of us don't see any cost at all for being untethered and free to use our phones without even thinking at all of what the battery life might be 12 hours later.

But you are thinking about it to the point of obsession. Otherwise, why would you go through the trouble of purchasing, charging, and swapping out batteries? I let that kind of inconvenience go many moons ago.

Otherwise, why would you go through the trouble of purchasing, charging, and swapping out batteries?

Trouble? Really?

Took me about five minutes to hit up Amazon and order. The stuff came in a couple of days.

Now, I've always got a spare battery. There is zero trouble involved.

On top of that, I also went to Monoprice and snagged 5 USB cables for, and I quote: "$9.23" after shipping.

I mean, it's such an incredible lack of trouble and such an incredible convenience that again, if I didn't know any better, I might think you just have a real hard time stepping outside your own comfort zone to see how other people might have different expectations and desires from their gadgets!

Quote:

I let that kind of inconvenience go many moons ago.

It is no inconvenience in the slightest.

It would be a lot more inconvenient if I was out and about from 9 a.m. til late in the evening, using my phone a lot - and I didn't have a spare battery.

As far as I can tell, if Apple's integrated battery consistently falls below 80% before two years, as they advertise, they will be at a disadvantage in the market compared to OEMs where two replacement batteries and chargers for $40.

And manufacturers with replacement batteries reputation wouldn't suffer when batteries would need to be replaced prematurely?

Sorry, your reasoning is still nonsense. Whether battery needs to be replaced by shop or customer, there is a loss of reputation by it.

One could as easily claim that manufacturers with non customer replaceable batteries try to minimize the lifetime of battery to a length where there isn't yet reputation loss as the replacement is extra revenue. Manufacturers with customer replacement batteries don't have such incentive as the revenue from batteries is less and the customer could as well buy some other manufacturers battery.

Yet there is decades of oems churning out devices with subpar battery life as well as endurance.

And yet, they do it? Why?

Because if you make the battery user replaceable, it becomes far less critical. People can and do replace batteries.

The problem is, this stance of Apple's, which its supports so often tout, has come with costs.

Whether it is LTE or some other feature, I remember being told two, maybe three times that it was "wise" for Apple not to do so-and-so a feature because of its terrible effects on battery life.

Well, part of that is because Apple insists on making the battery something users can't deal with. If it didn't insist on that, it could have instead chosen to supply some of these features a generation or two early; or at least provided alternate models where people could enjoy power hungrier features because either they didn't have a problem or because they could simply pop in that second battery.

But, that's not Apple's style. It likes to make things unserviceable and it's just another one of its many clever upsells. It also means that its users, once again, have to accept (and even defend) whatever trade-offs Apple chooses to make, since Apple tends to do these things across the board.

And the fact that other people (lots of other people) may roll a different way tends to get minimized or ignored. "You're not going to need that" or "nobody wants to do that" gets argued over and over again. Here, for something that fathers and mothers have done at Christmas for decades.

This whole conversation, which we've had four or five ways by now, probably, is entirely created because Apple wants to have all of the money associated with battery life, and its willing to sometimes stand the product on its head to have it.

It is a benefit of its integrated product line, but it is also a non-benefit and cost, because it forces all of its customers to value (or at least put up with) a particular set of trade-offs.

Apple does minimalism; it is correspondingly against flexibility, on the whole. This is just another example.

Yet there is decades of oems churning out devices with subpar battery life as well as endurance.

Clearly Apple thinks that it's more important to make the battery itself and fine tune the life it gets.

You can see that there are many phones that hold up to the iPhone in battery life, too.

I guess my question is - what are you trying to get at here?

It's clear you can go both ways and get good battery life.

I'm not talking about battery life, as that is a separate point; I'm talking about the ability to hold a charge 2 years after first turning your phone on.

Put another way, if your OEM won't ship you an OS update 12 months after selling you a phone, why would they worry about the fact that your battery is only holding a 60% charge since a replacement is only $10 a year later?

Many times now we have seen that OEMs don't care about the end user after a very short period of time; why bother designing a batter that holds 80% charge after 24 months when they don't care what OS you run after 12 months?

Yet there is decades of oems churning out devices with subpar battery life as well as endurance.

And yet, they do it? Why?

As I already evinced with my OS update example, it's because many OEMs don't care about you after they have already shipped a newer phone 6 to 8 months later.

Quote:

Because if you make the battery user replaceable, it becomes far less critical. People can and do replace batteries.

That's my point! If the battery is user serviceable, why bother making batteries that last for 2 years?

Quote:

The problem is, this stance of Apple's, which its supports so often tout, has come with costs.

Whether it is LTE or some other feature, I remember being told two, maybe three times that it was "wise" for Apple not to do so-and-so a feature because of its terrible effects on battery life.

I think it's defensible; I have an iPhone 5 with LTE and there is no LTE service in my city from AT&T and I'm unwilling to switch to Verizon's horrible new family data plan to get it.

Quote:

Well, part of that is because Apple insists on making the battery something users can't deal with. If it didn't insist on that, it could have instead chosen to supply some of these features a generation or two early; or at least provided alternate models where people could enjoy power hungrier features because either they didn't have a problem or because they could simply pop in that second battery.

There is a whole raft of tradeoffs involved: Larger phones or smaller batteries, a more complex design to accommodate a bay and cover, more complex software to deal with different batteries, especially third party ones, less features to cram in more battery, or make the phone larger again, etc.

Quote:

But, that's not Apple's style. It likes to make things unserviceable and it's just another one of its many clever upsells. It also means that its users, once again, have to accept (and even defend) whatever trade-offs Apple chooses to make, since Apple tends to do these things across the board.

Sure; like I said, I don't get AT&T LTE service here so having the sealed iPhone 4, and now the iPhone 5, was never a loss, and by the time I do get LTE in my area I expect to have upgraded to the iPhone 6.

Quote:

And the fact that other people (lots of other people) may roll a different way tends to get minimized or ignored. "You're not going to need that" or "nobody wants to do that" gets argued over and over again. Here, for something that fathers and mothers have done at Christmas for decades.

This whole conversation, which we've had four or five ways by now, probably, is entirely created because Apple wants to have all of the money associated with battery life, and its willing to sometimes stand the product on its head to have it.

It is a benefit of its integrated product line, but it is also a non-benefit and cost, because it forces all of its customers to value (or at least put up with) a particular set of trade-offs.

Apple does minimalism; it is correspondingly against flexibility, on the whole. This is just another example.

Yes, and so I argue Apple has a feature I haven't ever seen in another phone; my wife only got a 4S this year, before that she had been buying new Nokia dumb phones every year because the cost of upgrade ($18 with contract) was cheaper than buying a new battery every year ($12 plus shipping and handling, twice). She would use the phone for a year, and then it would only last for 12 hours on standby, and then it would only last 7 hours on standby, so she would get another Nokia dumbphone.

After 8 years of this she decided no more and just got an iPhone because she saw how even my original 2007 iPhone was getting better standby than her Nokia phone, 4 years later.

But there's nothing except anecdote to indicate that Apple really has a superior battery charge/discharge algorithm to maximize battery endurance.

As far as I can tell, if Apple's integrated battery consistently falls below 80% before two years, as they advertise, they will be at a disadvantage in the market compared to OEMs where two replacement batteries and chargers for $40.

And manufacturers with replacement batteries reputation wouldn't suffer when batteries would need to be replaced prematurely?

Sorry, your reasoning is still nonsense. Whether battery needs to be replaced by shop or customer, there is a loss of reputation by it.

One could as easily claim that manufacturers with non customer replaceable batteries try to minimize the lifetime of battery to a length where there isn't yet reputation loss as the replacement is extra revenue. Manufacturers with customer replacement batteries don't have such incentive as the revenue from batteries is less and the customer could as well buy some other manufacturers battery.

I gotta say the Apple battery situation is impressive. I have a 4-year-old iPod Touch I keep in a drawer as a remote. It must have had over 500 cycles on it but still holds a really good charge and can stay in the drawer on standby for weeks without draining. And that's the old tech.